


Awaken, My Love!

by leporicide



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, False Perceptions, Growing Pains, M/M, POV Alternating, Post-Apocalypse, Slow Burn Romance, Unsettling, space colonies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-01-26 12:51:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12557784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leporicide/pseuds/leporicide
Summary: Keith is an outlier, born of the Earth and barefoot, standing in the front of his class with his hair too long for space. The teacher asks what happened to his shoes but Lance wants to ask what happened to his eyes. They’re red, a rude color rimmed as if he has been crying.





	1. Outliers

**Author's Note:**

> I sat on this for a while and I really want to write a Keith and Lance dynamic where their love is almost the background to a whole universe of problems. If you can guess everything I reference, you're amazing. Rating will go up. 
> 
> Thank you Sam (@istehlurvz) and Kouji (@vilelike) on twitter for beta'ing the fic.

The world is bright strobe lights of red and blue and in the calamity, Lance fell in love.

I.

Keith was found on Earth.

Lance knows because there’s a monster in his step, a heavy touch of heel to glass floors that leaves damage in its wake. It’s unrefined, barbaric, the kind he hears he should stay away from because there’s nothing beautiful about Earth, just dirt and cold nights and white bones under the surface. There’s a reason they have abandoned it, his school director said during his first few years. There’s a reason the majority of the population packed up and left for orbit, safe in their colonies.

Keith is an outlier, born of the Earth and barefoot, standing in the front of his class with his hair too long for space. The teacher asks what happened to his shoes but Lance wants to ask what happened to his eyes. They’re  _ red _ , a rude color rimmed as if he has been crying.

When he sits beside Lance, dropping unceremoniously in the seat with a hiss, Lance wonders for the first time if the air is different down there.

II.

Lance isn’t the only one to realize that Keith is an outsider.

Rumor spreads fast and soon, he hears confrontations outside the class door. Loud boisterous shouts of placement and dirty blood, of the foul smell of natural soil that somehow clung to Keith throughout his journey, despite the mandatory wash downs. Lance hasn’t smelled anything, in fact, he almost wishes he has.

Keith doesn’t fight back in the beginning.

By the end of the year, Lance would sneak peeks at dripping knuckles hidden cautiously under a desk.

III.

People died.

That’s why they had to leave, because people were dying. The books say it was gas in the air. His mother claims the temperature became too cold. His father, that God was striking man for their cruelty.

Lance once asked, and was told how foolish he was for it, why didn’t everyone leave?

IV.

There’s a collection of stars that wrap around the colony in a distance that’s oddly similar to a noose. They keep the massive home in check from random pulls into orbit, letting it float carefree above the black planet.

That’s all Lance sees when he looks at the small circle below, a black planet.

He once confronted Keith about it, who after a couple swings, told him with the same rude red in his eyes that it wasn’t always black.

There are no pictures in textbooks of any other color, no articles or photographs, no sketches or paintings. As far as any of them know, it’s a small black  _ black _ seed of nothing that once birthed their families. Lance sometimes wonders if a collection of bodies lay below the mud, the clumps of dirt that sat under Keith’s nails when he first arrived. Do they look like them? The bones, hollowed out and stretched across yards of soil. Does anything grow with the festering of human flesh? Are the plants watered by blood?

When it was Keith’s turn to present to the class, he talked about the trees, trunks thick and dark with overgrowing roots that connect all forms of life. He was laughed at, forced to stand outside when the teacher demanded he suffer for lying.

He moved without a word, but Lance understood then. That the roots that crawled to the surface were much like Keith, sturdy and desperate for air, connected to something bigger than himself. That to Keith, as he barreled through the classroom door, this was temporary. 

There were no roots for him to connect to here.

No soil to dig his feet into.

V.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

Lance looks up to see Keith hovering over his desk, eyes trained to the glowing tablet under his fingers.

“What?” Lance asks, and it’s the first he’s ever said to Keith that doesn’t end in violence. It feels sacred, a stupid question that has the boy raising his eyebrows slowly before dropping them to narrow his eyes. 

“There,” Keith points, finger jutting out to press against the screen, bumping past Lance. His nails sting, chipped uneven from chewing. He smells like soap.

“Oh,” Lance purses his lips, furrowing his brow as he quickly edits the equation, enjoying the familiar ding of answering a question correct. “Thanks.”

When he looks up, he’s alone in the classroom. 

VI.

Keith was never awakened. 

There’s a screen that floats outside their classroom, a list of all the students with their awaken days beside names. Whenever someone’s date rolls around, little balloons were hologramed to travel up to the ceiling as they pass through the door.

It was cute when they were children but Lance is nearly sixteen rotations old. He can vote for their new chairman, buy liquor at the market, get a job as maintenance if he so chooses. He can kiss Allura under the sky deck with the constellations flickering to remind him who he is and run on the tiled floors until his feet burn cold. So when his awaken day dings and the balloons fly, he resists the urge to roll his eyes. 

He gets a lot of congratulations and blessings entering the school, small trinkets from his friends and a collection of sweets hand made by Hunk. It feels dull, repetitious as he takes his seat behind familiar black hair, staring at the colorful wrapping paper in his arms.

Keith turns around right before class begins, startling Lance as he reaches out, swiping a piece of candy and smoothly popping it in his mouth, sucking on it briefly before pulling a face. “Happy birthday.” 

Lance doesn’t know what a birthday is, adds that to the list that reminds him that Keith is different and shrugs. He can feel the red blossoming on his cheeks as Keith stares at him, only turning around after stealing another piece.

“Thank you,” Lance whispers, so quiet that the only sign he said anything at all is the way Keith ducks his head, eyes trained to the teacher in the front.

VII.

It takes a few bottles of beer, snuck in under Lance’s coat in their late-night classroom stakeout, to get Keith to talk about Earth.

The overnight session was mandatory, a test of courage all seniors in the class took in pairs. Lance, having been the last of his friends to partake, opted to go alone until he heard Keith asked to be partnered with him. The day was chosen without their consent and soon, Lance finds himself working to fit another beer bottle into the deep pockets of the trench coat he borrowed from Hunk. It’s ingenious, if he said so himself, except that every step is a chorus of singing glass.

Keith is waiting for him by the door of their shared classroom, leg sticking out to keep the door open. He’s barefoot, but Lance doesn’t expect anything else.

“Hey,” he greets, before turning his back to him and walking into the room. Lance quickly follows, jumping a little as the door shuts automatically behind them. 

The room is empty, void of the students that fill the seats during the day with loud chatter. In fact, the desks seemed to have been pushed against the wall, away from the center where a makeshift fort stood, a couple desks shoved haphazardly together with a slew of pillows and blankets. Lance looks to Keith for some sort of explanation and receives none as the boy takes a seat on one of the cushions, facing the naked glass windows that cover the entirety of the classroom wall. After a few silent seconds, Lance joins him on the other cushion. The beers clank as he hurriedly pulls them out and rests them all under the table with them, making a neat line between the two. Keith spares it a glance but doesn’t give it any more mind as his eyes trail back to space.

“It’s funny, huh? That we got the Harrowing day for this.”

“Is it?” Keith asks, and although it sounds distant, Lance knows he’s very much  _ here _ just as he is. “How long before it darkens?”

Lance glances as the hologram clock ticking about the teacher’s desk. “A half an hour, then it’s lights out.”

“Great.” A beer is opened effortlessly before being offered to Lance. He takes it and Keith does the same for himself.

“So, um. It’s crazy, we’re graduating soon.”

“I suppose so.”

“Do you,” Lance feels anxious for some reason, hot under the collar as he watches Keith’s attention slowly drift from the vastness of the universe to his own mediocre face. “Do you know what you want to do yet?”

“Yeah,” and it’s final, like that’s the end of that train of thought. Keith keeps his eyes on him, Lance can feel it burn hot like coal. “Do you?”

“What?” Lance blinks, his body becoming a balancing act of teenage emotional outlets and the romantic sways of a poet, wise beyond their years. 

Keith looks annoyed, reaching for another bottle,  _ when had he finished the first one? _ “Do you know what you want to do when you graduate?”

“Of course,” he scoffs, rushing to finish his own beer to match him, only coughing a little when he was sure Keith was facing away. “I want to be part of the recovery unit, you know? The guys who go back to Earth for – ”

“Memories.”

“What?” Lance asks for the second time that night. 

Keith turns his body to rest his back against the glass, leaning against it leisurely and now facing Lance permanently. His hair spills over the mixing pot of space, like black ink that forms small hands reaching out desperately to something greater. Was that what the people of Earth desperately looked like, when the planet grew heavy with ash? It seemed wrong. Lance remembers Keith’s angry face the first time they’d met, as if he’d been betrayed by God himself. 

“The hunt for memories. Old relics and stuff, right? Books? Languages?” His face is sly, enjoying how much the eye contact seems to make Lance more nervous, until he’s bumping their knees together in annoyance. “I heard a lot of them don’t come back.”

“It’s a perilous mission, but I guess being a hero was just my calling in life.”

“Is that what they’re calling it?”

“Shut up.”

They both reach for a third bottle that night, one more left as the clock counts down. Keith smiles and Lance forgets how to breathe. “They say the air is so toxic, it eventually kills them.”

“That’s just a rumor.”

“Plenty of people haven’t come back. Why the high turnover rate?”

“They found you, didn’t they?” It slips out so smoothly, like the alcohol charmed his lips into a beast that resembles the usual joking manner of Lance. He regrets it instantly, as the clock strikes the Harrowing and Keith’s smile fades with the last of the light.

It’s dark, so dark. Lance can’t make out Keith’s body, despite feeling the warmth of his knee against his. There’s no sound, no clinking glasses, only the hum of the colony ship, alive and well in the black cold. 

“They didn’t  _ find _ me, Lance.” 

“Oh,” is all Lance can say, because he wants this conversation to be over, because some part of him he hardly recognizes wants to say  _ sorry _ .

“Down there,” Keith begins. His voice isn’t as steady as it was before, and it rocks with the waves of Lance’s curiosity. “There’s people. There’s a life style.”

“Bullshit.”

“Listen,” he hisses. “There are trees, taller than the signal post down at the market place. Taller than the ballroom ceilings, with dark leaves.”

“Are they red?”

“Of course. And there’s these roots that sink deep beneath the Earth, twisting and turning and if you know what signs to follow, lead you to food, to water. In fact, if you knew what to look for, you could find these huge barks that caved in and can shelter you through the storms. There are old animals that still walk around, small and large. The air is crisp and if you can learn to ignore the constant smell of  _ burning _ , it’s fresh and—”

“How long?”

Keith stops, the pause is nervous and the ‘what’ is practically silent. 

“How long were you there?”

“I was born there.”

The clock strikes, signaling the end of the Harrowing and the lights resume. The beer is all gone and Keith’s eyes, now exposed to the blinding florescent of the classroom, are rimmed with the redness of vulnerability. Lance understands why the teacher made him stand outside the class those years ago. He narrows his gaze.

“Liar.”

And he kisses him. 


	2. Like Ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the light vanishes, the sound dimming to a muffled hum and all that’s left is the darkness of space and the soft, unnatural glow of Lance’s eyes. Despite it, Keith feels vulnerable, talks about Earth and the trees, the beauty of the wild life, the warmth beneath his feet he misses so desperately he could kill for it.
> 
> When the lights snap on and they are faced with the reality of who they are, ultimately nothing in cogs of a divine machine, Keith touches Lance’s lips.
> 
> It feels like ice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! the rating went up because the themes are going to get heavier. again, a ton of world building stuff. i'd really like to know where you all think this is going, because that's the best part of writing this story. thanks for all the comments, i needed that boost.
> 
> Thank you Sam (@istehlurvz) and Kouji (@vilelike) on twitter for beta'ing the fic.

VIII.

The ash makes his throat dry.

Keith tries not to breathe in, digging his feet deep into the soil as he waits. The footsteps are moving around him, ominous like the abrupt silence of the woods or the sudden stop in a waterfall’s flow. He thinks it’s in these moments, he feels something holy wash over him. A wave of a greater power, like the fire that burns just below the dirt under him. 

The movement edges closer to his hiding place, purposeful like the angels he used to read about in the old books. Horrific creatures of demand and obedience. When the footsteps stop in front of him, Keith knows he’s been caught. 

Hell is waiting for him, above the dead weight of the world.

IX.

They forget to scrub him down.

The sterile smell keeps him up the first night in space. Then it’s the eerie quiet, then the cold stares. It’s the coolness of the tiles under his feet, glass and smooth, nothing like Earth. The temperature is always low, and Keith swears his breath comes out in visible puffs while the rest of humanity remains unaffected. His body feels like a misstep in the plan here. His heart feels heavy enough to have a gravitational pull.

They remember the next day, because a woman is waiting for him when he opens the door. Dressed cleanly, white as the flowers under the volcano and crisper than the air. She smiles at him and Keith knows her reaction defines the grimness of him mirroring the expression. 

Maybe his smile is a misstep as well.

X.

He refuses the shoes. 

They’re uncomfortable and weigh him down. His toes feel cramped and sweaty. When he’s placed in a classroom, he discards them at the door. The tiles are cool to the touch but at least he feels somewhat free, finding himself enjoying the resounding slap his skin makes against them.

It distracts him, from the urge to cry. There’s humiliation in the way his mouth wavers when he’s looked upon for too long, the way he can’t seem to settle in any given place on the colony. Keith wonders why it’s even called a colony when there’s no sense of community. Just movement of people as cold as the space they surround themselves with. 

When he finds his seat beside another boy, catching the awkward and curious glances directed sheepishly his way, he thinks of what an empty existence this is.

XI.

“You look lost.”

Keith can read between the lines, that the  _ lost _ means  _ wrong _ . He’s fine with wrong, he’d been it since he was pulled from his hiding place in the dirt by long black leather fingers.

“You look bored,” he responds, just as assured. “Want to talk about it?”

The answer angers the other boy, who sneers, an ugly contrast by the forced camaraderie of the whole place. Keith likes it a lot, weirdly wants more of it because it centers him. 

The fists fly a moment later but that’s okay. There are no good or bad days on this floating piece of metal.

Just okay.

XII.

Lance stands in front of his desk sometimes, opening and closing his mouth like he wants to say something but never finds the right way to string them together.

Keith thinks he looks stupid, that speaking his mind should be easy because there’s nothing impressive to be said about the people here. Lance is always dressed the same, just as every other student, in the clean white uniform of the school, buttoned up just right. One button shy of completely mindless and one button too much from being rebellious. Keith suspects he takes the time in the morning to decide this factor of his clothing. Thinks it matters in the grand scheme of things. 

Keith’s buttons are missing and no one repairs them anymore.

Lance stands in front of his desk and Keith waits for him to say something. Blue eyes scan him, looks at his knuckles, bruised an ugly yellow, resting on his desk before hiking back to his face. The silence stretches as more students shuffle in before the other gives up. He smiles, apologetically before moving one over to his own seat. Keith wants to mirror his expression but finds himself more focused on how the smile of his never reaches his eyes.

XIII.

The Earth died.

That’s what he hears, that brimstone and fire burned everything away and stained his hands with soot. A fire below the dirt rose and the world ran to space, scrambling over one another for salvation. That’s from the old books Keith read, salvation and a garden.

The thing is, nothing can grow in space. There is no natural life here, in the silence of humming metal. There is no life in the eyes of the people here, no life in the food they shuffle in. There are no roots that interweave one to another, no trees that shade you from the oppressive sun. There’s nothing but distant stars, a floating black rock he calls home, and blue eyes that watch him with deadly precision. 

Keith feels trapped in the vastness of space.

XIV.

Lance struggles with math.

It’s obvious, as the other student’s breeze through the problems on the small tablets in front of them, Lance remains on the same one, editing and re editing the equation on his screen. Keith watches in his peripheral, the thin deft fingers roaming over it frantically over and over until he can no longer bear to watch it.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

Lance looks up, startled.

“What?” he asks, and Keith thinks it’s the first words they ever exchanged with one another, against the backdrop of the droning intercom and abrupt laughter of friends. Lance is watching him, and Keith is reminded of the sharp smell of ethanol.

“There,” he points to the error in the formula, leaning over him slightly. Lance smells like  _ nothing _ , and that might be worse than any feeling Keith has ever gotten. He misses the burning.

As he scrunches his gaze to the screen, Keith gets up and leaves, ignoring the quick calls of the adult teaching and barrels past the door.

XV.

There are no birthdays here.

He’s learned that the hard way, that there are no mothers and fathers. Just adults and children, with the same dead eyes and slow growing smiles. At night, or when it’s supposed to mock the night, their eyes sparkle like lightening bugs, flickering in and out of reality. 

No one seems to notice.

Instead, they call themselves awakened, as if humanity has been asleep for longer than Keith has been alive. It’s Lance’s day, the hologram outside the class blinks at them, mischievous with its balloons. The students flood him with good wishes and praise and Lance takes it all gracefully, laughing but never too hard.

Keith is envious that Lance seems able to curb himself emotionally. It’s shallow but sometimes, it’s all too much and he just feels incredibly  _ lonely _ . Nothing warm can live in space but anything cold remains. When Lance sits behind him, spilling small candies on his desk, Keith can’t resist swiping a few. When blue eyes meet his, he’s mesmerized, struggling to catch any form of conversation at his lips.

He goes for “Happy Birthday.”

And Lance looks confused, but if anything, he looks like Keith when he’s about to cry and doesn’t understand the reason. Keith turns around, chewing thoughtfully on the sweets, ready to focus elsewhere when he hears the quiet “Thank you,” tickle his neck.

A warmth blossoms inside him, resting deep in his gut that has him slinking further down into his seat. 

XVI.

It takes a few bottles of beer, snuck in under Lance’s ridiculous coat in their test of courage to get Keith talking about Earth.

He watches Lance, in his awkward long state, feet spread out in front of him as Keith rested his back against the glass. He’s not in the usual all white that stands starkly against the backdrop of space. It’s comforting, normalizing except Keith struggles to remember what’s really normal. There’s an infinite distance between them but the empty classroom tricks his senses, makes him feel closer to someone for the first time.

As the light vanishes, the sound dimming to a muffled hum and all that’s left is the darkness of space and the soft, unnatural glow of Lance’s eyes. Despite it, Keith feels vulnerable, talks about Earth and the trees, the beauty of the wild life, the warmth beneath his feet he misses so desperately he could kill for it.

When the lights snap on and they are faced with the reality of who they are, ultimately nothing in cogs of a divine machine, Keith touches Lance’s lips.

It feels like ice.

XVII.

“You’re running out of time,” Shiro says, watching as a fire makes home behind him. “It’ll be too late.”

The air is hot, hissing like a kettle and stinging Keith’s eyes. “I can’t,” he says. “I can’t, I can’t—”

Shiro is quiet, finally turning to fully face him, mouth fixed in an unreadable expression. “If you don’t hurry, there’ll be nothing to come back too.”

“Shiro, I know.”

“You’re sick, Keith,” he says, before being swallowed by flames. And Keith wakes up.

His body is hot, sweating through the covers as he quickly glances around the ceiling. He’s in his room, the clock is blinking with low battery and his breathing is as heavy as percussions. Something cold touches his thigh, a harsh contrast to the fire in his chest. 

Slowly, he turns his head and finds Lance, staring at him with unwavering blue eyes, humming with the quiet colony. Keith wants to ask what he’s doing here, wants to know why he feels like if he opens his mouth, lava will come out. Keith wants to ask Lance to cradle his heart because it’s beating much too fast,  _ he’s scared. _

Lance opens his mouth, but there’s no sound and suddenly, Keith is in the vacuum of space, surrounded by hollow planets and small suns. It’s static, rupturing in and out of his ears, horrifying as Lance’s expression becomes cruel, twisting into a teasing smile reserved for his friends. Keith has seen it enviously, and wishes it on no one in return.

“You’re sick, Keith.”

And Keith wakes up, crying and mourning but no sound escapes him.

XVIII.

The light flickers from one eye to the next before the doctor leans back, rubbing his beard with mild amusement. Keith doesn’t find anything about this funny, sitting in the cold room with his hospital gowned bunched up above his knees.

“As far as I can see, there’s nothing wrong with you.” 

“Are you sure?” Keith asks, his voice quiet and hoarse. It cracks and fades in and out like static from the old radios. “I woke up like this.”

“It could be a minor cold. Your immune system could have been compromised from your, uh…time on Earth.”

Keith doesn’t have much to say to that, but opts for getting dressed. 

“I suggest,” the doctor continues, “allowing me to run some blood tests and staying clear from others for a while. Don’t want a minor pandemic on the loose.”

“Sure,” he replies but it sounds like a hiss. 

“For now, I would keep to the confines of your room.”

XIX.

Keith keeps to the confines of his room for all of three days.

Classes come and go, and so do the people around him. He gets small visitors, the coordinator who helped him settle in when he was young, a couple girls from school. His neighbor, gentle as the elder man may be, only waved from across the doorway, as if afraid to catch whatever hell burned at the soles of Keith’s feet.

The room was stifling by the fourth, cutting off his oxygen in sudden heat flashes and he found he could no longer lay in bed without soaking it. He tries to read but finds he has no patience, tries to exorcise but finds  his body aching. When he’s finally convinced himself he could no longer wallow in his cold, getting up to leave, the lamp overhead turns off. There’s a knock on the door, urgent in its tapping.

The clock follows the lamp and soon, power ceases in his room. Though it’s not just his room, it’s every room. Keith knows this because the stillness mirrors the Harrowing, only much worse. Despite this, the knocking continues.

It takes him a couple of tries to reach the door in the dark and even longer to jimmy the older model open without power. Blue eyes, glowing soft in the black void in front of him, blink.

“We gotta go,” says Lance.

And it’s on this fourth day of burning that everything explodes into chaos around him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im trying man, we all are.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm @bogboogie on twitter and miss klance sometimes


End file.
